An Orange Pillow and a Cool Class

Last weekend I had the chance to attend a Freestyle Quilting workshop at Modern Domestic (our local sewing studio). The class was taught by none other than Elizabeth Hartman of Oh Frannson!. There were some other ladies from the PMQG there too, which made it extra fun! Joan, Amber, and Katie were all in the class.

We started off the class cutting and making 12 mini quilt sandwiches. Elizabeth then went over the walking foot and we all did a bunch of practice quilting with the walking foot using different methods. We did some 'wonky' straight lines, some random diagonal lines, some offset outline stitching, and a continuous geometric design which I ended up using in my mini Castle Peeps quilt.

Next we put on the darning foot and worked on practicing some different styles of free-motion quilting. We worked on stippling, long loopy lines, and pebbling. Elizabeth had us first draw these patterns on paper to get the hang of it. Then off we went. It's a lot harder to get a nice even stitch out of these patterns, but I'm surprised at how quick you can fill up a 12x12 area. The pebbling took the longest, but seemed to be the most forgiving. The stipple went quick but was the hardest to make look good. I have a lot more practicing to do before I use these methods on a whole quilt, but I really like the look, and enjoy doing it.

Thanks to Elizabeth for a great workshop and giving me the confidence to jump in to free-motion quilting. Here is Elizabeth's example pillow, and here is the one I came up with. Covered in a baby: